Andrew Sarris (1928 - 2012), one of the founders of modern film criticism

Andrew Sarris, the great American film critic died today at age 83. If you love movies, this is a sad milestone, even if you've never heard of the fellow and don't care to read reviews and don't trust film critics.

Writing for the Village Voice from 1960 until moving to the New York Observer in the late 1980s, Sarris was the foremost American champion of the French theory known as auteurism, which states that the director is the principal artist in the creation of a film and that following the career of an individual director of talent will reveal habits of craft, story and worldview. That seems obvious to modern filmgoers, but it was a revolutionary concept 50 years ago, and to espouse it in defense of such directors as Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Samuel Fuller -- dismissed by many filmwatchers as genre-bound hacks -- was a double assault on then-common sense.

Sarris was sufficiently devoted to his director-based understanding of the cinema to produce a book that was more or less a travel guide to the films, careers and talents of dozens of the the most noted directors in Hollywood. "The American Cinema, Directors and Directions 1929 - 1968" could be biased, curt, idiosyncratic and even dead wrong (he was unduly hard on Billy Wilder and John Huston, in most people's eyes). But it could not be dismissed.

Reading Sarris weekly in the Voice was de rigeur for New York film audiences (even more influential then, in the days before the multiplex, let alone direct-to-home premieres), and there are probably hundreds of film critics and filmmakers who were steered toward their profession by Sarris's combination of intelligence, advocacy and taste. He could recommend with equal vigor a film by Max Ophuls and an action film like "The Road Warrior," he wasn't shy about discussing which actresses he found most attractive, and he wrote with clarity and authority and, as so few print critics can any more, at great length. Even if you disagreed with him violently, you had to respect his insight and his self-assuredness. And you could do worse than use his collected Top Ten Films of the Year lists as the basis of a homeschool film education.

For decades he waged a not-altogether-friendly war with Pauline Kael, who brought a different set of passions and tools to her reviews at The New Yorker. Kael was more invested in the emotional experience of watching a film than Sarris, and she chided him for what she saw as the programmatic constriction of his aueteurist approach. There were some unpleasant exchanges between them over the years, in print and in person, but you feel that they got the best out of each other, like rival tennis players fated to reach their peaks at more or less the same time. They had some important predecessors in James Agee, Otis Ferguson and Manny Farber, but the film culture wasn't nearly as virbrant when those fellows were the top writiers. And though there were several other important critics in the game in the '60s )Stanley Kaufmann (still writing!) and John Simon leap most immediately to mind) Sarris vs. Kael was almost always the featured bout on the card.

Speaking personally, I found him an essential guide to my movie education. Like my dad, who was my first film teacher, he was born to working-class parents in a tough borough of New York City in 1928. They had a lot of tastes in common, though my dad came at his favorites through actors, stories and dialogue while Sarris favored seeing film as the work of a director. To find in the print world a writer who underscored inclinations that I'd been raised to have and used literary, philosophical and historical references in bolstering them was a revelation and an inspiration.

In the late 1980s, when I was working as an editor at "American Film"magazine (RIP), I was assigned to edit a piece that Sarris had submitted and which had sat on the shelf for a little while -- a story about the role played by radio in early talking pictures. I chatted on the phone with him two or three times, and when I suggested certain changes or new avenues for the story, he blurted back responses that were almost exactly perfect for print -- and entirely factually accurate. He was gracious, if not exactly warm, and he had an easily flowing prose style and an encyclopedaic knowledge of the field: in short, an editor's dream. (In the late 2000s, my oldest son was working as an intern at the New York Observer and was assigned to fact-check a Sarris piece; the thing was spot-on, he told me.) I'm very happy that when the editing process was over I took the initiative to tell him how much I'd always enjoyed his work and how he'd partly spurred in me the desire to become a film journalist.

The professorial Sarris influenced several decades of students with his teaching at Columbia University, as well as other schools, and enjoyed a long marriage to fellow critic Molly Haskell, who survives him.